Characterising the collaboration between academia and practice in UK Environmental Assessment

The UK has been one of the countries at the vanguard of developments of Environmental Assessment (EA) theory and practice. It is likely that this globally prominent position has been developed through ongoing collaboration between academia and practice which pervades teaching, research, and practice itself. However, the scale and nature of the collaboration is unclear, which restricts learning that might lead to encouraging and growing existing collaborations, not just inside but also outside the UK; therefore, the aim of this paper is to fill this research gap by characterising the nature of the academia-practice collaboration in the UK. To achieve this aim, a typology of collaboration was developed through literature review and used as the basis for a survey of research and publication active UK-based academics to both, validate the typology, and determine the nature of their collaboration with practice. The results, whilst biased to the views of academics, indicate a considerable range of collaborative activities that benefit both academics and practitioners alike. The resulting typology of collaborative activities might conceivably act as a template for knowledge exchange between academia and practice in the EA field. This template can conceivably be applied as a set of criteria to plan better collaboration to the benefit of academics and practitioners alike.